The 2026 Major League Baseball season opened Wednesday on Netflix. (I didn’t watch; I gave up on baseball after the Pirates lost the 1992 NLCS.)
The broadcast, as explained by John Ourand of Puck, had connective tissue to Netflix’s most recent NFL foray.
As Ourand explains in his Varsity newsletter, several ads that appeared during the Yankees-Giants game from San Francisco were “make-goods” due to Netflix’s failure to deliver numbers it had promised to advertisers for the Christmas doubleheader featuring Cowboys-Commanders and Lions-Vikings.
The games generated 19.9 million viewers for Cowboys-Commanders and 27.5 million for Lions-Vikings; however, Netflix fell short of the guarantees for the 18-54 demographic — reportedly by 18 percent.
And with Netflix not having any live sports from Christmas until exactly three months later, the “make-good” ads happened during the MLB game.
Ourand reports that Netflix offered to place ads on other programming, but many of them preferred to have ads purchased for a live sporting event to be used for a live sporting event.
With Netflix, to date, having only a smattering of live sports, the next opportunity was the first game of the MLB season.
For streamers like Netflix that will be cherry-picking big events and not buying full packages, it could become a common issue.
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